I've got a confession: I run my side hustle like I debug code. Every dollar that hits my bank account gets logged in a Notion table with columns for the source, the time invested, and the effective hourly rate. Some months that spreadsheet looks great. Some months it makes me want to close the laptop and go outside.
After 18 months of running a tech-focused blog and YouTube channel on the side (while keeping my day job as a backend dev), I've tested all three major monetization paths that creators talk about: display ads, sponsorships, and affiliate links. I want to share the actual numbers — not the guru estimates, not the "six-figure blogger" Twitter flexing, but the real income-per-hour breakdown from someone who treats this as a serious experiment.
If you're a developer or technical creator thinking about monetizing, here's what my spreadsheet says.
My Setup (So You Know the Baseline)
Before I dump numbers, let me be transparent about scale. I'm not MrBeast. My blog pulls around 50,000 pageviews per month. My YouTube channel sits at roughly 12,000 subscribers with videos averaging about 15,000 views in the first 30 days. I publish one or two blog posts a week and one YouTube video every two weeks.
I do this on nights and weekends. My day job eats 40+ hours a week, so realistically I get 8-12 hours per week on the side hustle. That math matters — because if a revenue stream takes 20 hours to maintain and earns $300/month, the hourly rate is brutal. Conversely, something that earns $400/month with two hours of upkeep? That's gold.
I track everything in a Notion dashboard with three columns: gross revenue, hours worked that month (estimated), and a calculated "effective hourly rate." Some people track RPM or CPM. I track hourly rate. It's the only number that keeps me honest.
Income Stream
1: Display Ads
Let's start with the easiest one. Display advertising is the "set it and forget it" model — drop some Google AdSense (or Mediavine, once you hit enough traffic) code on your site, enable monetization on YouTube, and let the impressions roll in.
Sounds passive. Sounds great. Here's the reality from my dashboard.
Blog ads: Over the last six months, my blog has averaged somewhere between $200 and $400 per month from display ads. That works out to roughly $4 to $8 per 1,000 pageviews. So if I write a piece that pulls 500 views in its first month, I'm looking at maybe $2 to $4 from that article. Per article. For an entire month of effort.
YouTube ads: A typical video of mine with 10,000 views earns somewhere around $30 to $50 in ad revenue. Tech content pays less per view than finance or lifestyle — the CPMs are just lower because tech advertisers historically pay less for eyeballs. I've had months where a video hit 25,000 views and I earned $80. Not a typo.
Per-hour math: I spend maybe 1-2 hours per month monitoring ad placements, checking for policy violations, and tweaking where ads appear on my site. So if I average $300/month from ads and spend 1.5 hours, that's roughly $200/hour. Decent on paper.
But here's the catch: ad blockers. A huge chunk of my audience — especially tech readers, who are exactly the people I want to reach — runs uBlock Origin or similar tools. Those users generate zero ad revenue. I'd estimate 30-40% of my pageviews are invisible to my ad network. So the real per-hour rate is even worse than it looks.
The verdict from my spreadsheet: Ads are a baseline. They're not bad, but they're not a strategy. They degrade user experience, they pay poorly for tech content, and they're vulnerable to ad blockers. I keep them running, but I'd never build a side hustle around them.
Income Stream
2: Sponsorships
Sponsorships are where creators start talking about "per-post rates" and "rate cards." This is when a company pays you directly to feature their product in your content — could be a dedicated YouTube video, a sponsored segment, a blog review, or even a banner placement.
This is also where my income spikes hardest.
My rates: For a YouTube video with my typical 15,000 views in the first month, I charge somewhere in the $500 to $1,500 range per sponsored integration. That lines up with what I've seen other tech creators in my tier charge — roughly $15 to $30 per 1,000 views is the going rate for tech sponsorships.
The per-video comparison: A sponsored video paying me $1,000 will outperform the ad revenue from that same video for its entire lifetime. Let me say that again. One sponsorship check beats every ad dollar that video will ever generate. That's wild when you see it in the spreadsheet.
The variance problem: And yet. Sponsorships are the most inconsistent income source I track. Some months I get three inbound offers and have to turn people away. Other months? Dead silence. I went through a six-week stretch last fall where I had zero sponsorship inquiries. Meanwhile, my ad revenue and affiliate revenue kept ticking along. That kind of unpredictability makes budgeting a nightmare.
The hidden time cost: This is the part nobody talks about on Twitter. A sponsorship isn't just "make the video and get paid." There's outreach, negotiation, contract review, content alignment calls, sometimes revision requests after delivery. I log all of this in my Notion tracker, and a typical sponsorship adds 2 to 5 hours of overhead beyond the actual content creation. That's time I'm not spending on my day job, not sleeping, not writing my next organic piece.
Per-hour recalculation: If a sponsorship pays $1,000 and adds 4 hours of overhead to a video that would have taken me 8 hours anyway, I'm at 12 total hours for $1,000. That's $83/hour. Not as amazing as it sounded at the top, but still solid.
The trust tax: The biggest non-monetary cost is audience trust. I've turned down sponsorships for products I wouldn't actually recommend. The ones I take, I genuinely use and believe in. But even with careful curation, there's a subtle shift in how readers perceive your content. Trust is a compounding asset — and sponsorships can slowly drain it if you're not careful.
The verdict from my spreadsheet: Highest per-deal revenue, but unreliable, time-expensive, and risky for long-term audience relationship. I treat sponsorships as opportunistic income, not a foundation.
Income Stream
3: Affiliate Marketing
Now we're getting to the interesting part — the income stream that has quietly become the biggest line item in my monthly Notion dashboard.
Affiliate marketing is simple in concept: you recommend a product, drop a tracked link, and earn a commission when someone subscribes or purchases through it. But the economics vary wildly depending on the commission structure.
One-Time Commissions: The Trap
Most beginner affiliates start with one-time commission programs. You promote a product, someone buys, you get paid your percentage once, and the relationship ends.
Let me do the math on a typical scenario: promoting a $100/year software subscription with a 20% commission. You earn $20 per conversion. That's it. You need a constant stream of new referrals just to keep the income flat. It's linear work for linear pay — which, as any developer knows, is a bad scaling pattern.
I promoted a few one-time-commission products early on. They made me money, but I was always chasing the next click. It felt like running on a treadmill.
Recurring Commissions: The Actual Game-Changer
Then I discovered recurring commission programs, and everything changed.
With a recurring structure, you earn a commission every single month that the person you referred stays subscribed. You're not getting paid once — you're building an ever-growing base of monthly recurring revenue that compounds over time.
Let me show you the math on my biggest affiliate partner right now: the Global API affiliate program.
Here's the structure: 15% commission on the first order, 8% recurring commission on all subsequent renewals, and 10% for premium tier referrals. They offer access to 150+ AI models through a single API integration, which makes it a pretty easy recommendation for my developer audience.
Let me break down a realistic scenario. Say I refer 20 new subscribers in a month, and each of them signs up for a $99/month plan.
- First month: 20 × $99 × 15% = $297 in first-order commissions
- Month 2 onward: 20 × $99 × 8% = $158.40 in recurring commissions
- If half of them upgrade to a premium $199/month plan: add another layer of 10% recurring on top Now here's where my developer brain lights up. Those 20 subscribers from month 1 don't disappear. They keep paying. So in month 6, if I've referred 120 total subscribers (20 per month) and retention is, say, 85%, I'm earning recurring commissions on roughly 100 active referrals. 100 × $99 × 8% = $792/month in pure recurring revenue — and that number keeps growing as long as I keep creating content. Compare that to one-time commissions: 120 referrals × $20 each = $2,400 total, but spread across six months and then zero after that. # # # My Actual Affiliate Numbers I won't share exact revenue (some things stay private), but I'll tell you what my dashboard shows for trend lines. In month 1, affiliate income was about $180. By month 6, it was $640. By month 12, it crossed $1,100. And critically — the time I spend maintaining it has stayed roughly the same: maybe 2-3 hours per week writing content that naturally includes affiliate links. Per-hour math: $1,100/month ÷ 10 hours/month = $110/hour. And that rate keeps climbing as the recurring base grows, even if I publish less. That's the magic. Recurring affiliate income is the closest thing to passive revenue I've found in this entire experiment. It rewards consistency over hustle. --- # # Side-by-Side: The Spreadsheet View Let me put all three streams in one table so you can see how I actually compare them each month. | Stream | Avg Monthly Income | Hours/Month | Effective Hourly Rate | Scalability | |--------|-------------------|-------------|----------------------|-------------| | Display Ads | $300 | 1.5 | ~$200/hr | Low — tied to traffic | | Sponsorships | $900 (but lumpy) | 10 | ~$90/hr | Medium — depends on inbound | | Affiliate (recurring) | $900+ (compounding) | 10 | ~$90+/hr and rising | High — compounds with referrals | A few things jump out:
- Ads look great per hour because they're almost zero effort — but the absolute dollars are tiny.
- Sponsorships have the highest peaks but the worst consistency. Some months I make $2,500. Other months, $0.
- Affiliate recurring income has the best long-term trajectory. The hourly rate today is fine, but the monthly total grows without proportional effort. If I had to pick one stream to bet on for the next three years, it's not even close: recurring affiliate income. --- # # Why Recurring Affiliate Wins for Builders Here's my take, having logged all this data: if you're a technical creator — someone who writes tutorials, builds tools, reviews developer products — recurring affiliate programs are structurally aligned with how you already think. Developers love systems that compound. Recurring commissions are exactly that. Every blog post you write, every YouTube video you publish, every tweet thread that lands — they all keep generating revenue long after you hit "publish." It's like writing a function once that keeps returning value. One-time commissions are spaghetti code: they work once, and then you rewrite the whole thing next month. Recurring commissions are well-architected: clean inputs, durable outputs. --- # # The One Caveat I Have to Mention Recurring affiliate income isn't a magic trick. You still need to drive consistent traffic. You still need to create content people actually want to read. The recurring part just means your past work keeps paying you back — it doesn't replace future work entirely. But what it does mean is that every hour you invest today has a longer tail than you might think. A blog post I wrote eight months ago is still sending me affiliate signups every week. That post took me maybe 4 hours to research and write. At this point, it's generated more per-hour return than any sponsorship deal I've ever done. --- # # My Honest Recommendation If you're starting a tech content side hustle in 2026, here's what I'd tell you based on 18 months of tracked data:
- Run display ads as a baseline. Don't optimize for them. Just don't leave money on the table.
- Take sponsorships selectively. They pay well per deal but burn trust and time. Only say yes when the product is genuinely good.
- Build your income around recurring affiliate programs. This is where the compounding happens. This is what makes the side hustle feel like it's actually building something. If you want one specific program to start with, I'd point you to the Global API affiliate program. It's the one that made the biggest difference in my monthly numbers. You get 15% on the first order, 8% recurring on every renewal after that, and 10% recurring on premium tier referrals. Their platform covers 150+ AI models, which means it's a natural fit for almost any developer-focused audience you might have — whether you write about productivity, automation, data pipelines, or app building. The signup is straightforward, the dashboard tracks your referrals cleanly (which my spreadsheet-loving brain appreciates), and the recurring structure means every conversion keeps paying you back. You can check it out here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate?ref=devto-tech-affiliate-vs-sponsorship-vs-ads I'm not saying it'll replace your day job overnight. Nothing does. But if you're putting in the hours on content anyway, you might as well stack the income model that actually compounds. --- That's my 18-month experiment, fully logged. If you're running your own numbers, I'd love to hear what your spreadsheet says — drop your effective hourly rate in the comments. Always curious how other devs are tracking this.
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